When a Few Thousand Pounds Isn't Enough (to buy you a laptop connection on British Airways)...

Here I am, sitting on a British Airways flight about to leave LHR and I can't
use my laptop in the "World Traveller" class. I had planned to use the next 5
hours or so to catch up on work. So much for global connectivity...

But alas, my ticket was only $2521. It turns out that World Traveller is just a
posh name for ECONOMY, so no perks with British Airways today. Amazing how
little the dollar buys you these days.

Adding insult to injury, after spending more than $100 to buy an "inverter" to
enable my laptop to connect onboard (plus the myriad phone calls to the airline
to find out which craft I was flying -767- and tail number to find out if the
plane was wifi enabled, as well as a 25 minute head scratching session with a BA
Customer Service Agent at T5 - he graciously thanked me for teaching him
something today), it turns out that my new purchase is completely useless on
board... I'm not sitting in the right cabin.

Ah....

Worse still, the cabin crew were not "allowed" to sell me an upgrade onboard and
I was not permitted to power my laptop in any of the dozen or so empty seats in
front of me.

I'm not in the "right" cabin.

Now for the irony.... I just spent the week in London attending the Farnborough
Air Show, watching airlines place big orders for new craft and then at the
Airline Retail Conference to hear Ryanair's Micheal Cawley tell the airline
industry to "grow up and act like a business," while others talked about the
urgent need for airlines to develop sustainable revenue models that would endear
loyalty. In other words, thinking beyond the baggage fees.

So here's a start.. When a customer is willing to pay more than $100 simply to
plug their laptop into your plane, take their money.. And when a customer is
willing to pay for an upgrade on the plane, take their money too.

You could actually make some money. How novel.

NB - I sat down with the Purser to discuss what happened. The sad reality, she
told me, is that she has less power to satisfy customers than ever before. She
said because of fraud and the airline's inability to implement consistent
policies, she had no idea what the future would hold for her after a 22 year
career with BA, or her fellow flight crew.

Long Live Reading, Digitally and In Print

Earlier this week, Amazon announced that for the first time, electronic books for the Amazon Kindle have outsold hardcover books. The online bookseller averaged 143 Kindle book sales for every 100 hardcover copy sales over the last three months. WOW.

Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the impending death of print. And with it some other things, you know, like cultural literacy, Western civilization, and all knowledge.

Although I own a Kindle (and most recently an iPad), I have hung onto the (obviously) antiquated notion that the tactile sensation of a book in your hands (or, for that matter, of a newspaper spread between them) contributes to the experience of reading. So I am sympathetic to the fear that books will become obsolete; should that happen, a sizable chunk of me will become obsolete right along with them.

But I don’t see that happening.

I was watching Ghostbusters not longer ago, and in a great scene Harold Ramis’s character announces to Annie Potts’s harried secretary that “print is dead.” (This, for fans, is just before Spengler tells her that he collects “molds, spores and fungus” as a hobby. Classic.) The point is, Ghostbusters came out in 1984- more than 25 years ago. Not to make Ramis and Dan Aykroyd (the writers) out to be bad prophets, but print still isn’t dead, despite the tremendous advances in technology that might have rendered it such. I’d bet it continues to survive at least for another generation. Or three.

The Amazon announcement doesn’t refute this belief, either. Look closer at the figures, and you realize that they don’t account for paperback sales, which make up the bulk of Amazon’s total book shipments. They also don’t mention the fact that Amazon is aggressively promoting e-books, to facilitate sales of its Kindle, offering electronic titles for as little as $0.99, versus the $9.99 price of a hardcover new release. And let’s not forget that Amazon is only one retailer. They make a good barometer, to be sure, but as the dominant online bookseller, Amazon is in a better position to facilitate the sale of e-books than a brick-and-mortar bookstore with an ancillary website. All of this indicates that the popularity of e-books is indeed growing, but not necessarily that print is doomed.

If print was doomed, if this did mark the first death throe of the beloved book, would that really spell the end of life as we know it? I’m not so sure. E-books facilitate reading, and in certain circumstances can enhance it. They aren’t printed on bundles of dead trees. They are easier to obtain, particularly through Amazon.

Regardless of the ratio of e-books to hardcover to paperback, the figure that’s forgotten is that Amazon sold more written material this quarter than last. More people are reading. More people are buying authors’ work. More people are interested in divining the wisdom deep within a book.

These are positive developments, and we should recognize them as such.

So let’s not sound the death knell for books quite yet, and let’s not fret quite so much about what happens when we must.

In the meantime, I’m going down to the local Waterstone's bookstore (in Richmond, London) to grab the Stieg Larsson trilogy for both of my kids.